Monday, 28 November 2016

Advanced Painting: More Mussels and Transcription

Before my Advanced Painting class on Friday I prepared a couple of quilted pieces with photos of the outside and inside of a mussel shell printed onto black t-shirt transfer paper applied to a fabric background (monoprinted or printed photos of shibori/sand ripples. My intent was to extend the patterns from within the shells to their surroundings, embedding them. More work is required but I'm excited by the possibilities. Next step scaling up! There was a lot of interest from the others in my class on using textiles to paint on.

I also did some more work on the canvas from a couple of weeks ago, building up more layers , again more work required.

The focus of the lesson itself after a pep talk on strategies for working was on 'transcription ' copying artwork and making it your own , looking at the techniques used but also as a springborad for your own ideas

We looked first at Kehinde Wiley's interpretation of David's Napoleon then discussed how to 'steal like an artist' like Picasso did!

A bit of fun looking at the pastiches of Edward Hopper's ' Nighthawks' ( original at the top) . It's actually quite difficult to find a picture of the original if you google it, there are so many parodies! But you could use a detail, the colour scheme , the composition and produce something completely different.

Eileen Cooper spent some time as artist-in residence at Dulwich Picture Gallery and you can see some of the influences of looking at the paintings there in her work but it is uniquely hers

The optional exercise was to copy Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne looking carefully at composition and tone. I didn't do it myself as I was absorbed by the mussels but there were some very varied and interesting results from those that did from random colour choices ( but observing tones) to broad expressive bush strokes. It reminded me how much I learnt drawing from the masters at the National Gallery, so much I did it twice! And just rediscovered from the books in storage is this book which features some of my drawings.